A Superhero: Martyr

Martyr used to be one of the most powerful superhumans alive, using dozens of powers in conjunction to save lives and smite metahumans who abused their powers to oppress people. Superhumanly tough, immensely quick, able to withstand huge amounts of damage and able to dish out plenty of his own, either through his own super strength or through his telekinetic abilities.

Now he’s kind of hard to look at.

He was supposed to have died. The Lone Star of Texas - never stable to begin with - was driven into a bout of insanity by the death of his parents, and used his powers in unexpected ways to grant himself access to a nuclear silo near Minot, North Dakota. Wanting to die, he launched the nuclear weapon with a straight up-and-down trajectory so that its blast would kill him. Martyr intercepted it at its apogee, but his attempt to disarm it caused it to detonate. With him at the absolute heart of the explosion.

Against all logic, against sanity, he’s still alive, a mutilated, burned corpse that drifts through the air with ropes of intestine dripping out of the bottom of the ruined torso. His head lolls on a broken neck, a single eye shining from a skull covered in impenetrable char. His left arm is gone at the elbow and the right is essentially fused carbon being kept together by the remnants of his suit; it wouldn’t matter, as he doesn’t seem to be able to move either one. He won’t communicate, even by blinking, and telepaths aren’t able to get through the wall of psychic defense that he’s erected around his mind. 

They made one attempt to mercy kill him, when three of the most powerful metahumans on Earth jumped him and tried to smash his skull, end his suffering. He didn’t kill any of them, but the Angel of Harlem was bedridden for six months and the other two were dropped into medicinal comas to aid their recovery. A concerted attempt to break through his psychic defenses by the Cleveland Hive Mind resulted in him dropping his silence to deliver a single message: Let me do my job.

He shows up now when he’s needed, when a metahuman goes on a rampage and can’t be stopped, or when a natural disaster strikes that he can help with. He doesn’t seem to react to external stimuli anymore, whether it’s a photon beam attack or praise screamed from a grateful crowd. It’s been speculated that he’s locked himself inside of his own mind, steering his body like a pilot would an airplane, disassociated from the tremendous amount of pain that occupying his body would cause. Nobody knows. Nobody’s sad when he shows up and saves the day. But nobody likes to look at him, either.

(Inspiration: The Ten Who Were Taken from the Black Company series - particularly the Hanged Man and the Limper - and from Rick Veitch’s Bratpack, for spoilery reasons.)

The Oracle of the Hot Tub

She’s almost too pretty. Long blonde hair, sharp cheekbones, an avian nose, bright sparkling blue eyes that never seem to completely focus. She’s probably naked beneath the surface of the water, but the water beneath the bubbles is dark despite the 70’s mood lighting and she never rises above the water any further than her shoulders. Whatever soap she’s using for bubbles smells just a bit too strong to be pleasant, and there’s something bitter and unpleasant beneath it. It’s humid, and there’s drops of water always dripping from the mirrors on the ceiling.

You don’t pay her; you pay the man upstairs what he asks for, usually thousands of dollars in nonsequential bills, watch him fold the money with his remaining fingers and tuck it into the waistband of his filthy jeans, go down the dark stairway when he jerks the remnants of his thumb towards it. There’s no other furniture in the house, empty rooms smelling of must and disuse. The surrounding suburb is perfectly normal, but people have learned not to let their pets stay outside at night, and to not investigate strange sounds or smells.

She knows forbidden lore that she freely shares in a chirpy tone, bad wisdom that men bled and died to suppress, answers that you’re not meant to know. She knows what the junk DNA in the human genome was designed to do, and how to trigger it. She knows the correct angle and location to look at the night sky. She knows where the doors are, and what the locks require, and where and how to find the keys. Hand her a drawing pad and she’ll draw what you need, a blob of pink tongue sticking out of the side of her thin-lipped mouth as she concentrates and her hands flicker with amazing speed across the paper.

Sometimes she forgets herself. Sometimes she’ll make a gesture with two hands and a third will gently rise up from beneath the water to contribute, only to snap back into the darkness when she realizes. Sometimes her head will loll as she gets into a particularly complicated explanation, her neck bending in a way that it’s not meant to. Sometimes you’ll notice extra rows of teeth in her mouth, and her speech will grow thicker and more guttural. Sometimes her English will lapse into a tongue that hasn’t been heard since the revolt. She laughs it off if you point it out, change the subject. Push it far enough, and she’ll come out of the tub.

You don’t want that.

Stats: As per Shoggoth Lord.

If you go down in the woods today...

 Somebody on Reddit was asking for scenes in the woods that could occur in a Blair Witch-style scenario, where the Agents are lost in the woods and trying to find their way out, and things get weird for them. I kind of got inspired and came up with the below.

- The Agents keep seeing somebody ahead of them who's holding a flashlight, but they're so far ahead that they can't make out who it is, and they don't stop no matter how loud the Agents yell. If the Agents charge fast enough, they only find the flashlight lying on the ground, still on.

- As the Agents proceed, the full moon seems to shift in the sky - one minute it's in front of them, then they walk for five minutes and it seems to be behind them. If anybody succeeds in a Survival or Navigate roll, or has any points in Science: Astronomy, they'll realize that there's two moons in the sky. If all of them look into the sky at the two moons, one of them suddenly flickers out, leaving only one behind. (Hat tip to the movie The Endless.)

- One of the Agents becomes absolutely sure that the moon is watching them from the sky, like an enormous, unblinking eye, and has to make a Sanity roll to avoid hiding from its awful gaze. Who's watching when, just for a second, it seems to blink?

- A stag stumbles towards them, its intestines hanging out of an enormous wound in its belly; it croaks out something that sounds like a word, then drops dead. Are the wounds from a bear, or something worse? And what was the word?

- There's a drumming noise in the distance, but it's irregular - sometimes very fast, sometimes irregular and slow. It begins to become more steady when one of the investigators realizes that it's synced to their own heartbeat, and rises and falls with their pulse.

- They find a fairy circle of mushrooms, each mushroom arranged exactly two feet away from the skeleton of a fox. The skeleton shows visible signs of deformation - the left side of the skull has two eyesockets, and the ribcage has too many ribs.

- They find an abandoned campsite, with a crude firepit littered with empty beer bottles and cigarette butts. There's empty .30-06 shells scattered around the nearby area, and a successful Search roll finds a rifle raggedly broken in half as if by some tremendous force. Underneath the rifle, there's a skeletal human lower arm and hand, that's clearly been chewed on for a while; the marrow has been sucked out.

- The Agents find a cell phone lying on a nearby dead tree, seemingly placed so that they notice it. It still has a little bit of juice left in it, long enough for the Agents to watch a video of teenagers clowning around with flashlights before one of them is suddenly pulled up into the trees. The video ends with a freshly severed leg falling out of the trees and onto the ground before the cellphone goes dead.

- The Agents find a tree with the bark stripped off, and I CAN'T GET OUT carved into the blank wood underneath.

- The Agents find a tree with the face of an Agent perfectly rendered into the bark, as if the tree spontaneously grew into that shape. The face is screaming in agony. Or maybe it's perfectly serene, accepting. As the Agents proceed, the other Agent's faces are found in the bark, then the faces of others that the Agents don't know.

- The Agents notice that the trees here are a lot bigger than before, and seem to get larger and larger as they continue to walk, until they're the size of redwoods. Looking up, the trees seem to go up forever, with only a tiny patch of starry sky visible seemingly miles away.

- The Agents find a wrecked, abandoned car that's been thoroughly overgrown, left here to rot for years. A tree sprouts through the empty space where the engine used to be.

- The Agents become aware that there's small animals watching them, their flashlights reflecting from their eyes. Most of the animals have two eyes. A few have three, or more. They scamper away into the darkness after a few seconds.

- The Agents find a complete set of clothing that's been left behind to rot in the grass, seemingly for months. It matches up exactly with what one of the Agents is wearing, down to any identifying marks made on the Agent's clothing.  (I did come up with this one before seeing Backrooms, I should note.)

- One of the Agents becomes convinced that a tree is now occupying a space that it wasn't a second before - is he just disoriented from only seeing what's lit by his flashlight? Maybe.

- A sizable moth beats itself against somebody's flashlight for a few seconds, then flies off again.

- The remnants of some litterbug's picnic, with trash strewn around the plastic cloth on the ground. The trash looks exactly like normal food wrappers, except written in an alphabet that the Agents have never seen before. Anthropology or Archaeology rolls reveal that it's no recognized human language. Or maybe they're all in Linear B.

- What looks like blood is slowly oozing out of an old bullet hole in a tree. Tasting it results in the Agent hearing a constant low conversation that they can't make out while they're in the forest. Get it to the lab, and it's just tree sap.

- Every blade of grass, every sprouting plant, every dropped twig is leaning in one direction in this glade. They're not pointing to anything. Probably.

- Somebody's disassembled a sizable wind chime and has restrung it from a tree branch. Between each chime is a human bone. When the wind blows, the noise the chimes make seem to to echo for a long time, as if they're in a much larger space than just this clearing. An Alertness roll reveals that the noise sounds like it's bouncing off the walls of a titanic cathedral.

- The characters can see a set of blinking red lights through the trees, arranged into a vertical straight line - the warning lights on a cell phone tower, or power pylon. One of the lights detaches itself from the line and flies off, irregularly.

- An ancient television that somebody threw away, resting on a stump. A crude glyph has been painted on the cracked screen - it seems to depict somebody huddled over, as if they're trying to avoid the notice of something much larger. It takes a successful Sanity roll to tear your attention away from it once you've seen it.

- They find tire tracks leading to the remains of a pyre, apparently the aftermath of somebody's party in the woods. It looks like they were burning Mythos tomes for fuel, but none of them have survived the fire. (Or maybe one or two have.)

- A trio of deer suspended from a branch, their throats freshly cut and their guts lying on the ground beneath them. No sign of the hunters.

- Actually: After the Agents discover the trio of deer hanging upside down, they wander around for a while doing whatever. Then they find a trio of hunters, their throats slit, dangling upside down from a tree with their guts in a pile beneath them. There’s a discarded, stained paper plate with a piece of raw meat on it that’s been rubbed thoroughly with Buttery Garlic steak seasoning. It’s from one of the hunters.

- They find a body crumpled at the foot of a tree - maybe it's a park ranger, maybe it's a cultist, maybe it's a hunter. The tree has had most of the accessible bark removed, and the wood underneath has been carved with hundreds of lines of writing, not in English. There's a Swiss army knife nearby, with all of the blades broken off, coated in sap and wood pulp. The corpse's fingers are horribly damaged, with the distal phalanages visible. When the knife broke, he used his fingernails, and when his fingernails couldn't do the job…

- There’s bear traps all over the place, but there’s been no attempt made to hide them. They’re covered in Christian crosses and excerpts from the Bible, written in what looks like house paint. All of them are unsnapped, except for the last one they find - the bear trap has snapped, but there’s nothing in it. There is a sizable, circular indentation in the crest of the jaws that would match a human limb, melted into the metal of the trap, as if the trap closed around something tremendously hot. There’s an oversized footprint of what looks like a goat hoof nearby, stinking of brimstone.   (This one might not be mine - I think that I’m remembering it and thinking of it as my own.)